Abstract

Purpose – What are the implications of the global financial crisis and
its aftermath, regionally and globally, for Africa taking a 5-15 year
view? The purpose of this paper is to outline a set of four post-crisis
global economic scenarios to 2020, and will consider their impacts
across a range of low income countries.

Design/methodology/approach – The scenarios were developed using a
version of the morphological scenarios approach, Field anomaly
relaxation (FAR). This approach creates a backdrop of internally
consistent futures for policy formation and decision making through
identifying and analysing the most significant drivers of change within
the global financial and political system. This was then linked to a
modelling approach to identify country impacts. The work was developed
and tested with stakeholders in the United Kingdom and Kenya.

Findings – Scenarios are plausible, coherent, multiple views of the
future, which enable policy-makers and managers to evaluate strategy or
policy choices under conditions of uncertainty. The work creates a
structured approach to reviewing outcomes for growth, poverty reduction
and the Millennium Development Goals for different types of developing
economies, against the background of the financial crisis.

Research limitations/implications – The work was conducted for a public
sector client in the United Kingdom, with a limited budget and a limited
timescale.

Practical implications – The combination of scenarios and modelling,
applied to the field of development, enables greater clarity about the
choices presently facing developing African nations. In particular, the
economic typology used shows that for the majority of African countries,
strategies which improve resilience in the face of rising energy costs
and possible food shortages will also generate economic opportunities.

Originality/value – Innovatively, the scenarios were tightly connected
to a ‘‘soft’’ model which identifies possible pathways, causal linkages
and transmission variables between the scenarios and associated levels
of economic growth and poverty reduction via key economic variables.
This permits more granular interpretation of the scenario outcomes than
conventional scenario analysis techniques.